Comprehensive set of tools for machine learning and data mining to enhance your insights through predictive analytics.

Description

Mining your own data and turning what you know about your users, your clients and your business into useful information it’s now an easy task. With Weka, an Open Source software, you can discover patterns in large data sets and extract all the information. It also brings great portability, since it was fully implemented in the JAVA programming language, plus supporting several standard data mining tasks.

The article Multi-instance classification explains which classifiers can perform multi-instance classification and which format the data must have for these multi-instance classifiers.

Weka offers different approaches for performing attribute selection: directly with the attribute selection classes, with a meta-classifier, or with a filter. Check out the Performing attribute selection article for more details and examples.

How do I perform clustering?

How do I perform text classification?

How do I generate compatible training and test sets that get processed with a filter?

Weka offers clustering capabilities not only as standalone schemes, but also as filters and classifiers. Check out the article about Using cluster algorithms for detailed information.

Running a filter twice (once with the training set as input and then the second time with the test set) will create almost certainly two incompatible files. Why is that? Every time you run a filter, it will get initialized based on the input data and, of course, training and test sets will differ, thus creating incompatible output. You can avoid this by using batch filtering. See the article on Batch filtering for more details.

Main concepts

Weka explorer

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a data set or called from your own JAVA code. It is also well suited for developing new machine learning schemes. Weka's main user interface is the Explorer, featuring several panels which provide access to the main components of the workbench: the Preprocess Panel, the Classify Panel, the Associate Panel, the Cluster Panel, the Select Attributes Panel, and the Visualize Panel.

Preprocess Panel

The Preprocess Panel has facilities for importing data from a database, a CSV file, or other data file types, and for preprocessing this data using a so-called filtering algorithm. These filters can be used to transform the data (e.g., turning numeric attributes into discrete ones) and make it possible to delete instances and attributes according to specific criteria.

Classify Panel

The Classify Panel enables the user to apply classification and regression algorithms (indiscriminately called classifiers in Weka) allowing you to the resulting data set, to estimate the accuracy of the resulting predictive model, and to visualize erroneous predictions, ROC curves, etc., or the model itself (if the model is amenable to visualization like, e.g., a decision tree).

Associate Panel

The Associate Panel provides access to association rule learners that attempt to identify all important interrelationships between attributes in the data.

Cluster Panel

The Cluster Panel gives access to the clustering techniques in Weka, e.g., the simple k-means algorithm. There is also an implementation of the expectation maximization algorithm for learning a mixture of normal distributions.

Select Atributes Panel

The Select Attributes Panel provides algorithms for identifying the most predictive attributes in a data set.

Visualize Panel

The Visualize Panel shows a scatter plot matrix, where individual scatter plots can be selected, enlarged and analyzed using various selection operators.

Data integration plugins

Weka Scoring Plugin

The Weka Scoring Plugin is a tool that allows classification and clustering models created with Weka to be used to "score" new data as part of a Kettle transform. "Scoring" simply means attaching a prediction to an incoming row of data. The Weka scoring plugin can handle all types of classifiers and clusterers that can be constructed in Weka. Documentation on this plugin can be found here.

ARFF Output Plugin

The ARFF Output Plugin is a tool that allows you to output data from Kettle to a file in WEKA's Attribute Relation File Format (ARFF). ARFF format is essentially the same as comma separated values (CSV) format, except with the addition of meta data on the attributes (fields) in the form of a header. Documentation on this plugin can be found here.

Package manager

Weka packages are bundles of additional functionality, separate from the capabilities supplied in the core system. A package consists of some jar files, documentation, metadata, and possibly source code. This allows users to select and install only what they need or are interested in, and also provides a simple mechanism for people to use when contributing to Weka. Some of the existing packages are provided by the Weka team, while others come from third parties. Weka includes a facility for the management of packages and a mechanism to load them dynamically at runtime – there are both a command-line and a GUI package manager. More information on how to use the Weka Package Manager is provided here, as well as a list of WEKA Packages here.